Vulnerability
by aces
Summary: A companion's thoughts about the Doctor's vulnerable side. Don't make fun of me. Please.


Short on plot, big on thought (ee, that rhymed). The Doctor's companion (one that I made up, in case you get confused), sitting by his bedside when he's ill, and thinking...something I came up with on a whim and actually managed to finish somehow—I don't know how well it sounds in the end, but there you go. I feel duty-bound to remind you that I don't own the Doctor or the TARDIS; they belong to The Powers that Beeb, and I make no money from this story. I doubt that I _could_, quite frankly. But please read on...

Vulnerability

He was so vulnerable.

That was the thing that really got to Marc, as she sat in a bedroom close to the console room and watched the Doctor sleep. He was so damned vulnerable. Sure, he could save the Universe in two seconds flat without a second thought, but he would probably end up killing himself again in the process.

Or at least, something bloody close to it.

He had managed with her help to stumble into the TARDIS and set the controls, hanging onto the console for support. And then he'd slowly collapsed, almost in slow motion, while Marc watched in open-mouthed astonishment, unable to help.

Hell, she couldn't believe he'd lived through that bomb blast long enough to get her inside. But to just...fall over like that. Without any fuss or bother or hiss of pain. She half-expected to see a banana peel on the floor underneath him and him looking up at her in mild embarrassment.

He'd half-woken, muttering something incomprehensible to Marc (she wasn't sure it was even any language she knew), and she'd pulled him up, out of the console room, and taken him to the nearest bedroom she could find, both of them staggering drunkenly whenever his knees buckled.

She dropped him on the bed. He was already asleep the instant he fell. At least, she hoped it was sleep. She had no idea what to do for him in any case. She stared down at him in bemusement for a few long minutes, and then set about getting him cleaned up.

She washed his face and hands off with a cool rag. He'd lost his frock coat somewhere back on the planet, and she wasn't about to try maneuvering him around so she could take off his dirty wing-collared shirt and torn vest and ripped trousers. Instead she just covered him in blankets and brushed his golden-brown curls away from his closed blue eyes and worried about him.

He looked so vulnerable in his sleep. His chest barely moved as he breathed; his eyes occasionally flickered and his voice occasionally murmured nonsense words. She actually found it soothing--she always found his voice, his accent, soothing--and it reassured her that he was, at least, still alive.

After she'd cleaned him up and tucked him in, she'd gone into the bathroom and taken a long, scalding shower, luxuriating in the heated water against her skin, massaging the shampoo into her hair and scalp, allowing her body to at last relax.

And then she sank down to the floor of the bathtub and sobbed for ten minutes.

_Reaction_, she told herself when she at last stood up and turned off the water.

_Shock_, she added as she toweled herself off and put on a thick pair of jeans and a bulky sweater. She felt cold, a bone-deep cold that seemed like it could never go away, no matter how many layers of clothing she put on, if she sat near a fire or an oven, how high she turned the furnace (if she could turn on the TARDIS furnace, which she doubted she could; she had no idea if it even had one...she shook herself out of her meandering thoughts). And she felt shaky and jittery, like a vibrating wire, or as if she hadn't had enough oxygen lately.

_Shock_, she repeated.

She stole back into the Doctor's bedroom, connected to the bathroom, and sat down in the only chair, pulling it close to the bed. She watched the Doctor sleep peacefully, his young, aristocratic face softened by its frame of golden-brown curls. She wished he would open his blue eyes so she could talk to him.

Ask him why he kept going. How.

She wanted to hold his hand. She wanted him to hug her and reassure her. He was so good at that. He always made her feel better, made her feel safe.

_My very own father figure_ she thought ironically.

She had nothing to do. The Doctor had set the coordinates for--wherever--before sliding so gracelessly to the ground, and it wasn't as if she understood the TARDIS well enough to fly her anywhere anyway. There were no strange alien planets to explore, and she didn't really want to leave the Doctor's bedside anyway. Just in case he woke up, unnerved and disoriented, needing to see a friendly face, or a glass of water, or someone to talk to. Just in case he needed...anything.

After all, he'd done it for her often enough. He'd saved her countless times, from prison cells and hungry vampires, from terrorists and...bombs. He'd carried her that time she broke her ankle; he'd held her hand when a doctor in the future somewhere had given her a shot; he was the one who had refused to let her give up; he had smiled down at her when she woke up from a delirious fever; he had hugged her and let her cry on his shoulder when she saw somebody else die.

The least she could do was return the favor.

Even if he was the one always getting her into those messes in the first place...

_Not his fault_, she reminded herself, shaking her head in gentle self-reproof. She was the one who had insisted on being shown if the TARDIS would really work; she was the one who had carried on traveling with him when he had offered her the chance to go home. She knew she couldn't go back to her history books and tests and college parties until after she'd seen more, done more, been more. Until after she'd danced on the moon, until after she'd met Lady Jane Grey and Oscar Wilde, until after she'd been received at a royal court and ran down a cobble street in Ireland, until after she'd gone tanning on a planet with three suns, until after she'd met some real aliens and found out if they were any more alien than some of the people she'd met at college.

She couldn't turn her back on him.

She was _his_ only constant. The Doctor's life was a whirlwind, a mad dash, a frantic caper. The loneliest existence possible. He could make instant friends wherever he went, and he might even remember them if he ever went back to that place in that time, but he always left eventually--normally sooner rather than later.

He needed a friend. A constant companion, if you like, someone he could tell his plans to and drop names at and show off for. A link, an anchor, to some semblance of... reality (an odd word to use when around the Doctor, Marc mused to herself). A reality that involved real people, with personalities and thoughts and feelings, not just a blur of a crowd who needed rescuing. Someone he could share jokes and jelly babies with, someone he could have ongoing arguments with, someone who became used to his unpredictable ways.

Someone who could relate to the people he was trying to save. After all, the Doctor could be quite incomprehensible to those who didn't know him. And even to those who did.

Marc really wished the Doctor would wake up now and reassure her he was all right. She didn't know what she'd do without him. She didn't know what the Universe would do without him.

_Stop that. He's just sleeping. He needs rest. He'll be all right._

But he looked so vulnerable. 

She slipped out of the bedroom for a few minutes, running to the library to pick up a book, something to keep her company while she kept the sleeping Doctor company. She could have gone to her room but she didn't feel like reading about history at the moment. She found an Albert Campion mystery, something she'd read long ago and loved. She returned to the Doctor's room and watched him sleep whenever she needed to take a break from her book.

The room was quiet, soothing in its almost-silence, the only sounds the gentle hum that always pervaded the TARDIS and Marc's and the Doctor's breathing. She knew he would wake up at any moment and bound out of bed, stopping only long enough to rush off to the wardrobe room to find a replacement frock coat before going out to explore another new planet and in all probability get his ass kicked _again_.

Marc almost felt like laughing at that thought. He was just so good at chaos, at disrupting everything. Never a dull moment in his company. But he was so strong, so good, so powerful--she'd actually met a real-life hero.

And he was still breakable. It was so unfair. After everything he did, constantly, saving a planet everyday and the Universe once a week on average, he really deserved to be a little sturdier than this. He should be able to avoid bomb blasts and gunshots and prisons and poison.

But perhaps it was good he was vulnerable. Maybe it reminded him he wasn't immortal, that he did have to take some precautions. That he was flawed. Fallible. That if he wasn't vulnerable, he wouldn't be able to understand why it was so important to fight back. Maybe it helped him understand what he was fighting _for._

_Okay, it's time I got some sleep. Either that or a head check_, Marc thought, shaking her head in disbelief at the fanciful direction in which her thoughts were wandering. She'd find some more blankets and a pillow and camp out in the chair next to his bed. She didn't really feel like going back to her room anyway.

She glanced up as she marked her place in the book, a careless movement of her eyes, not expecting to see any change in him. He was watching her, penetrating blue eyes unblinking, the covers up to his chin but his arms resting by his sides outside the blankets. He looked so childlike, so...vulnerable.

She held his gaze but didn't speak. Not yet. She didn't even feel relieved yet that he was all right. It was a frozen moment for her, any thought or emotion gone clean out of her head. She knew she wanted to ask him a lot--how he felt, if he would be all right, where they were going next, how he kept going. Why. But she didn't ask any of it. She just looked at him.

"Thank you," he said. He smiled, that slow, irresistible smile that made him seem like a five-year-old on Christmas morning. The smile that said everything would be all right, just because he could still smile like that. And the thank you said so much, acknowledged that she had worried about him and cared for him, watched over him, and that he had needed that. Had needed her.

He was so vulnerable.

She couldn't help but grin back at him, a big, cheerful, cheeky grin that was full of joy and relief and delight. It was an utterly smug, self-satisfied look. The Doctor laughed at her.

"You're welcome," she told him.

All right, it's cheesy. You don't have to flame me; I'll do it myself. Just leave a poor, defenseless little fanfic writer alone! : )


End file.
